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Ken Campbell ~ England |
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| Ten Years of Uzbekistan A Commemoration By Ken Campbell and David King London, England: Ken Campbell, 1994. Edition of 50. 20 x 14"; 60 pages. Bound in black cloth in a black cloth slipcase. Printed by polychrome letterpress using woodletter numerals and Monotype Bodoni text. Edition of 45 plus 5 artist's proofs. Ken Campbell: "The book was a collaboration with the photographer David King. During research for his archive on Soviet Art, DK discovered a copy of a book designed by Alexander Rodchenko, who had been driven to obliterate, with ink and paint, the names and faces of those in that book who had fallen from the favour of and been destroyed by Stalin. While writing the text DK discovered their names and, where possible, their fates. Ten portraits, nine altered by Rodchenko and the tenth of Stalin as an endpaper to Rodchenko's book, were enlarged and layered over each other in a process of mutual silencing. I surrounded death of the marred faces with a printed frame that reflected both the page margins and, I hoped, the frame of a Russian ikon. This framing device is echoed in the preserving of photographs of the beloved and dead. The frames were made from thin zinc plate glued to wooden mounts. During the violence of the printing process the zinc started to buckle and shift. The buckling gave strange printing effects. The movement was stopped by firing staples from a gun into the zinc. This produced odd images from the staples: chromosomic, buglike; given hints of the buttoning of the lip. The same frame, but well ordered, was used to surround the texts of the introduction. "This work stands as witness to the victims of censorship, and to the shame of self-censorship as a strategy of survival. In Russia it is said 'here we die for it'; meaning poetry." £ 3,000 |
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TILT: the black-flagged streets 12 x 9"; 62 unnumbered pages. Letterpress composed of Albertus type, found lino blocks, and handmade zinc blocks. Many passes including metallic dusting and handwork. Bound with black cloth spine and decorative paper boards in trapezoid shape. In printed slipcase. Ken Campbell, The Maker's Hand, Twenty books: "'Tilt' was the widest-cast net so far, bringing the most disparate things together. I wrote a poem called Storm Song in Canada in 1981, after listening to a sung account of a maritime disaster on one of the Great Lakes (The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I think it was). I also had in mind the vertiginous steps of flagstones up to the old cathedral at Whitby and the black flag of anarchy and disturbance. I had found some old mounted lino blocks which were random-sized squares, black flags of different sizes, and some Albertus type, rather beaten up. "While in Zürich I walked into the Museum Rietberg and up to a statue of Shiva, with limbs hanging out in funny angles, and lightning in his/her hair, all in a big wheel of fire. I can remember the statue saying to me, I'm coming into your book. I thought, what the hell has Shiva got to do with this book about a Storm Song and the Whitby steps and black flags? And I thought, well, I'll do as I'm told, as ever. The following morning at breakfast I drew the figure of Shiva, with breasts, and realised it was a puppet that I was going to dismantle. I made a puppet out of zinc pieces; it is disassembled from the right-hand page by repeatedly having a piece of its body nominated by a decorative silver star. Each piece is removed and replaced on the left-hand page. Alongside this cycle of nomination, removal and redisposition, the poem accumulates line by line. In this way Shiva is removed from the wheel of fire of the material world on the right, and repositioned and rebuilt in a calmer place on the left. "Each new line of the poem is revealed between black flags, the flags being arranged to suit the disposition of the line that they enclose. A decorative border is used to re-affirm the rectilinear nature of the page to counter what I did to the cover, which was to make it tilted and disturbed. "A line in the poem refers to 'the kingly fisher of men.' A Christ or Osiris figure perhaps, but I discovered that Halcyon, the kingfisher, mythically made its nest on stormy waters, thus calming them. This seemed to complete the circle proposed by the poem. "I also discovered, as an act of necessity, an odd process which I have called offset letterpress. To enable a previously printed coloured element to show better through a recently-applied dark solid, I immediately ran the wet page through the press again after having wiped the solid plate clean. This removed ink from where it sat on the underlying image but not from where it was sitting in the virgin paper. "The statue of Shiva that spoke to me had, unbeknownst to me at the time, been a childhood obsession of our Zurich hostess. The statue in the Museum Rietberg was accompanied by a dancing girl, who appears at each end of this book." |
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IN THE DOOR STANDS A JAR 9.5 x 9.25"; 44 unnumbered pages. Polychrome letterpress, metallic dusting and handwork. Printed slipcase. Ken Campbell: "'There's usually some kind of formal problem in the books - a way of dividing space up for good clear reason and for making things work in a useful sequence. I had a notion of putting a reduced version of the book's two-page spread, which is a designer's term for an opened book, on one page and putting the same two-page spread reduced on the opposite page, so you're looking at a kind of visual pun: two spreads on the whole spread. "On each page is another, smaller two-page spread printed on a black background. In each smaller spread is what is left after I have printed black solids as a window over and around the female forms. Black over colour gives ghostly images of the complete form. The poem runs laterally through the colour and bleeds off into the darkness on either side. There are very large dark borders. I had started to play with borders both as ways of containing the work in a field and as a dark space at the edge of things; a free-fire zone in which things seen in other parts of the book and things remembered can affect that which stands in the light. "I wanted to bury words in those borders as a kind of visual echo of the words being used in the poem, a metaphor for where words come from in one way of creating poetry: hearing echoes of sound and meaning from other places. This process is pursued in other, later books. "I cut a female form out of a background of zinc and wood, and then cut it in half so that there were four blocks which were then manipulated and printed in a variety of colours. The jar that stands in the door is both a woman's thick-waisted torso, and a jar which is cut up, dismembered and moved around. It was a tilt back to my designer past, making a page move almost in a cinematographic way through the book, in the spaces between the two verses. It was a very formal piece, a very sculptural thing to do. So the book is about joy and darkness, and the sensual face of this world, and the fact that death moderates all." |
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Night Feet on Earth 11.75 x 10.25"; 40 pages. Printed letterpress in four colours from woodletter and handcut zinc blocks. Slipcased. Ken Campbell: "The recent visitation by Halley's Comet, and its image upon the Bayeux Tapestry, brought forth a poem about comets and a divine child descending; a rather pagan Christmas Carol. The poem is set in airily spaced woodletter capitals, and is alternately revealed either in white space or on a dark, starry backdrop. A comet appears. Its form is gained from the back leg and tail of a dark horse that moves about the printed firmament. The horse is sometimes dismembered, and sometimes whole. "At a Christmas dinner in Oxford I found a party cracker on the table and opened it and found, along with the necessarily silly paper hat, a little plastic thing like an articulated hat rack. It was a horse that you could open and shut. I asked a lady to my right what it was that she did. After no little thought she replied 'My husband is a linguist.' I thought, 'I'm going to do a book about these bizarre conjunctions.' Halley's Comet, the horse, and this poem in my mind: that is the poem of the book. I cut out a zinc horse in its different attitudes, opened and shut, and moved it around a firmament of stars. The stars were holes drilled at regular grid intervals in a solid zinc plate that was to supply the blue black night sky. "The text is given in very few words for each page. At the end of many of the pages I show the first word of the next page at the foot of the text to give rhythm and to echo the tradition of cueing the eye for what is to come overleaf. Set in capitals about an inch high, the poetry runs from one left hand page to the following left hand page. On the right hand side is a big blue firmament of graded colour with yellow printed underneath to give a little light to the dark horizon. Sometimes the stars are white and sometimes yellow, to give a very mechanical but velvety rendition of the sky in regularly spaced stars. Over this disports a horse in black a metaphor for the comet; a metaphor for the divine child descending. "In the first half of the book the first half of the poem is shown on the white, left hand page while the second half of poem is pursued in the dark right. After a central spread where the parts of the horse are wildly rodeo-ed around the firmament, the process is reversed and the first half of the poem is pursued in the dark, left hand page, while the second half of the poem is revealed in the now white, right hand pages. "On the slipcase and the closing page the horse's tail has been distorted to give a fiery tail of a comet. This book is where the hooves touch the ground." |
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AbaB 9.25 x 13.5"; 68 concertina-folded pages. Formed from 17 joined sheets as one long strip, pasted onto heavy endboards of varnished wood, in a cloth slipcase. Silkscreened by Jim Birnie at Norwich School of Art on Heritage Rag acid-free paper. Ken Campbell: "''I wrote and artworked the book in three parallel and overlapping lines that run its length disregarding the concertina folds. The centre line records a conversation that took place between 'A' and 'B'. It stands as a proposition for a piece of sculpture, and also floats whisky on 'an ocean made of paper.' The other two lines help or hinder the progress of this notion: all three lines are in expanded or condensed woodletter forms deployed to assist this book's stammering progress from left to right. "I had two cases of woodletter, of different printing heights: one Anglo-American, an extra fatfaced serif; the other Didot, a Continental sans serif, very condensed and beautiful. They were so different in their respective fatness and thinness that they represented the polar ends of type design. As an act of cussedness I thought to do a book that brings the two together and see what happens. A formal problem to run ragged the poetry to come. Then I thought of an ocean made of paper; 'think of an ocean, think of a notion.' The text followed a conversation between 'A' (me) and 'B' (Bruce Brown, in brown). We were discussing Borgesian convolutions. We began thus: A: 'Think of a sea.' B: 'You mean the letter?' A: 'No an ocean made of paper...' The conversation continued and I wrote it down. This was the first time I had generated text for a specific book. Up to that point the books had been slim volumes of verse attempting to break out of that mould." |
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| Father's Hook songs from a living son By Ken Campbell Bath, England: Ken Campbell, 1978. Edition of 100. 6.5 x 13"; 48 pages of which six leaves fold out. 24 sheets of very thin Chinese hand made paper folded at the fore edge. Texts are printed letterpress, from Akzidenz Grotesk type. Printed by Campbell at the Bath Academy of Art. Imagery with rectangular lino blocks; and printed in split duct color in black, yellow, orange, green, and red. Chinese bound with invisible thread. Stitched Oriental-style, held between two pieces of varnished plywood, and secured with an elastic band. Ken Campbell: "This book carries a cycle of poetry written during and after the death of my dock working father, and is dedicated to him and his laboring. The book is in all respects as formally severe as it could be made. "In the print room of the British Museum I found a long, Oriental silk called 'Admonitions to the Ladies of the Court'. Its visual structure and aesthetic seemed to me to be a source of much of what was good in modern British graphic design at the turn of the 1960s, the time that I trained; the confidence to float images in colour fields and working within structures of feeling rather than structures of injunction. To attempt that aesthetic while describing my father's life of grinding labour was, always will be, irresistible. The book is on very fine Chinese paper, almost like shirt cloth – it's the first time I fell in love with paper; it was sensuous but could not be pushed around; it had to be worked with; the form thereby found. The full sheet of the paper was in the ration 2:1. I decided that this proportion denied all classical modulations and enhanced the severity of the whole. I therefore folded the sheet and made the finished size exactly 2:1 as a comment on the rigor of the life described therein. I cut two pieces of lino to the same size as the book page, and worked and turned them on a press, to release austere imagery. "It has pages that are folded so as to open up, because the backs of these leaves were very beautiful as a result of the paper being so thin and the pressure so great that ink went right through it and came out the other side. I found the process to be dictating the form while I watched. In this I was the midwife to the incipient; a condition to be experienced in later books. Every page was fixed entirely by eye and without a grid to guide, and pages and poems moved around to find the form. A very delicate, almost fleshly book: that was the intention. The docker's hook was an instrument of labour. The hook, as a snare, hung on my father's working arm. The hook, as a question, floats within the text." £ 1,700 |
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| Documenting his work | |
The Maker's Hand 9.375 x 12"; 104 numbered pages. Written, designed and published by Ken Campbell. Printed by Specialblue, London. 70 colour photographs and 16 monochrome images. Trade edition, open. Softcover with glossy black pictorial covers. Ken Campbell: "The Maker's Hand is about the twenty artist's books that I have made between 1975 and 2000. The publication marked an exhibition of my artist's books at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, which opened in March 2001. There is an introductory essay by Marcia Reed, Curator of Rare Books, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. The Maker's Hand' gives an insight into the physical and mental processes deployed during each title's gestation and might be seen as an affordable reader in my work as a book artist over the past 25 years." |
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Page last update: 11.25.11
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